A Tutorial of an R Package: IRmplus

• In Event: Poster Session for Quantitative Methods and Statistical Theory

Abstract

Mplus is one popular statistical software to estimate the latent interaction effect using the latent moderated structural equation approach (LMS). However, the effect size of a latent interaction that supports the interpretation of estimation results is not currently available from the Mplus output. To relieve human computations and facilitate interpretations of latent interaction effects in social science research, we developed an R package IRmplus to calculate the effect size of the latent interaction above and beyond the first-order simple main effects in latent variable modeling. This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide for applied researchers to estimating latent interaction effects in Mplus, and to obtaining the effect sizes of latent interaction effects using the IRmplus package.

Authors

• Lu Qin, Howard University

• Jihong Zhang, The University of Iowa